Find your soul in the Holy LandHoly Land of Jesus (I)
At the time of Jesus, Judaism did not form a uniform bloc, but was divided into six schools:
- The Sadducees (in Hebrew "saddoqím", from their progenitor, "Saddóq"), who constituted the priestly class and elite of the time. They were wealthy religious functionaries, serving in the temple, who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead or in the existence of angels, demons and spirits and held that the only law to be followed was the written law contained in the Torah, i.e. the first five books of the Bible (Pentateuch).
- The Pharisees (in Hebrew, "perushim", which means "separated"), pious observers of the Law, used to pay attention even to the minutiae of the Law, which for them was not only the written Law (Torah), but also and above all the oral Law, the "halachah", which extended to the most varied actions of civil and religious life, from the complicated rules for the sacrifices of worship to the washing of dishes before meals. The Pharisees were very similar to the ultra-Orthodox Jews of today, of whom they are practically the forerunners. They described themselves as "separate," since they considered themselves opposed to anything that was not purely Jewish, i.e., themselves. Suffice it to say that they were called "am ha-areṣ", people of the land, in a derogatory sense.
- The herodiansknown more for their loyalty to King Herod. They must also have been very close to the Sadducees, since the latter were the elite most prone to the power of both Herod and the Romans, bent as they were on maintaining the privileges derived from the "status quo".
- The Doctors of the Law, or scribes (Hebrew "ṣofarím"). They progressively codified everything they could legislate. For example, at the time of Jesus the most debated issue, in the two main rabbinical schools of the great teachers Hillel and Shammai, was whether it was permissible to eat a chicken egg on the Sabbath).
- The zealots (whose name in Italian comes from the Greek "zelotés", but in Hebrew it is "qana'ím"). The terms "zealots" and "qana' īm" mean "followers" in both languages and refer to the zeal with which this group adhered to Jewish doctrine, also in a political sense. Among Jesus' disciples there is one called Simon the Canaanite, where "Canaanite" does not refer to geographical origin, but to membership in the "qana'īm" group, i.e., the Zealots. These were basically uncompromising Pharisees also from a political point of view, not only religious. The Romans called them "Sicarii", because of the daggers ("sicæ") they hid under their cloaks and with which they killed anyone they found breaking the precepts of Jewish law.
- The Essenesnever mentioned in the Jewish or Christian Scriptures, but spoken of by Flavius Josephus, Philo, Pliny and others, constituted a true religious brotherhood, spread throughout the land of Israel, but concentrated in particular around the Dead Sea, near the oasis of En Gedi (Qumran). They were very much like a religious order and rejected the Temple cult and other Jewish sects as impure. They were literally fanatical about ritual purity and strict separation from the rest of the world, which they considered impure, and had a rigid aversion to women. Private property did not exist among them and they practiced, with some exceptions, celibacy. It has been hypothesized that both Jesus and John the Baptist were Essenes, but this clashes with the universality of their message (open, among other things, to women).
These were, then, the main groups into which Judaism was divided at the time of Jesus. After the great catastrophe of 70 and 132 A.D., the only ones that survived, from the doctrinal point of view, were the Pharisees, from whom modern Judaism descends.
Beliefs, customs and traditions of Judaism
Judaism at the time of Jesus was in the so-called "mishnaic" phase (10-220 A.D.), from the Hebrew root "shanah", the same as the words "Mishnah" and "shanah", which means year. The "Mishnah", in fact, together with the Talmud and the Tanach (term designating the corpus of the Hebrew Bible) is the sacred text of Jewish law. However, the Talmud and the Mishnah are not the Bible, but exegetical texts that collect the teachings of thousands of rabbis and scholars up to the 4th century AD.
Well, the immense material of such exegetical texts was being elaborated at the very beginning of the Christian era, therefore under the Roman occupation, by the Tannaim ("tannà" is the Aramaic equivalent of "shanah" and indicates the act of repeating), true "repeaters" and disseminators of the doctrine acquired from the masters and themselves masters of the Oral Law. An example of this phase are the scribes, who progressively codified everything they could legislate, from forbidden foods to the rules of purity.
Through this process of codification, the Jewish Law no longer extended to the ten rules contained in the Decalogue, but now dominated every action of the pious observant, with 613 main commandments, divided into 365 prohibitions (like the days of the year) and 248 obligations (the same number as the bones of the human body).
When Jesus lived, there were two great schools of Jewish thought, that of Hillel and that of Shammai, which represented two different perspectives of Jewish law, the first being more rigorous and the second proposing a spiritual reform of Judaism based on the concept "You shall love your neighbor as yourself", expressed in a midrash. Jesus, who from a purely Jewish point of view could be considered one of the Tannaim, positioned himself as a synthesis between the two schools of Hillel and Shammai, preaching that not one iota of the Law would be abolished, but that the fulfillment of the Law itself was love of God and neighbor.
Two were the fundamental pillars of the life of every Jew, besides professing the oneness of God, and upon these pillars, especially after the persecutions of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (167 B.C.), the very identity of the people of Israel was formed:
Circumcisioncircumcision, which was performed eight days after the birth of each male and was usually practiced at home, gave the child his name. Pious traditions told that even the angels in heaven were circumcised and that no uncircumcised person would enter paradise (non-circumcision was an abomination for the Jews as a symbol of paganism).
Sabbath observancewhich began at sunset on Friday (the parasceve) and ended at the following sunset. This observance was so strict that two treatises of the Talmud were devoted to its casuistry, with a whole series of prohibitions (for example, lighting a fire on the Sabbath) and the dozens of minutiae that allowed escape from it (for example, it was forbidden to untie a rope knot but, in the case of an ox, horse or camel halter, if it could be untied with one hand, there was no violation of the Sabbath; Or, one who had a toothache could rinse himself with vinegar, provided he swallowed it afterwards and did not spit it out, for in the first case it would be taking food, which was lawful, and in the second case taking medicine, which was unlawful).
The Sabbath was, and is, for Judaism a day of rest and festivity, in which one devotes oneself to eat with one's family the food prepared on the eve of the Sabbath, to dress in appropriate clothing and adornment, and to devote time to prayer, in the Temple or in the synagogue.
To the two pillars mentioned must be added ritual purity, to which no less than twelve treatises (the "Tohoroth") are dedicated in the Talmud, about what is permitted to eat, touch, drink, etc. Great importance was given, in order to maintain or recover purity, to the washing of hands, dishes and various objects, to the point that, in some sentences, those who do not wash their hands are compared to those who go in the company of prostitutes. We understand, at this point, the scandal caused by the disciples of Jesus to take food with unclean hands (Mark 7:1-8. 14-15. 21-23).
The parties
In addition to the Sabbath, a weekly feast, Judaism observed other periodic feasts, the main ones being Passover ("Pesah", the feast celebrating the liberation of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt) on the 14th of the month of Nisan, followed by the Feast of Unleavened Bread; Pentecost ("Shavu'ot", which in Hebrew means "weeks" and indicates the fifty days after Passover) and Tabernacles ("Sukkòt", between September and October, which commemorates the stay of the Jews in Egypt, in fact it was and is customary to build tabernacles or tents and spend time there). These three were called "pilgrimage feasts" because every male and pubescent Israelite was obliged to go to the Temple in Jerusalem.
Other feasts were Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement, a fast day for all the people and the only one on which the high priest could enter the Holy of Holies in the Temple), Hannukah and Purim.
Writer, historian and expert on Middle Eastern history, politics and culture.
